New Anti-Drone Net Cannon Is Straight Out of James Bond Films

Casting nets in the sky for the flying machine-fish, drones.

A super-serious British fellow snipes a drone out of the sky with a net-cannon in a new promotional video that looks like it could have come from MI6’s Q department (but not the recent sassy hipster quartermaster, the Desmond Llewelyn good one). The SkyWall1000 Drone Defense weapon is the latest in a long line of unmanned aerial vehicle countermeasures, in which each solution is more comical than the last: a radio-wave jamming gun, a drone-intercepting drone, eagles trained to snatch drones out of the sky.

Rogue drones pose two problems to those who wish to stop them: First, the small, quick-moving UAVs can be tough to shoot down; and second, even if you were to hit the flying devices with a traditional firearm, the blast from a shotgun could destroy it, which is bad because cameras on drones may store potentially valuable evidence — as heroin-smuggling drones already have shown. After the cannon’s net captures the UAV, a parachute deploys above the drone and gently lowers it to the ground.